Tag: tutorial

I’ve just attended Nokia Developer Day on 6-7 December 2011 in Chiang Mai. I’ve already written a summary about the first day dealing with Series 40 Java and Web Apps Workshop. The second day was focused on Qt/QML (Qt Meta-Language) software development for Nokia’s Symbian phones. Nokia will phase out Symbian operating system in 2016, but they’ll still support it until that time. Nokia will also port Qt to lower end phones (e.g. Series 40) on a new operating system based on Linux called Meltemi. Overall Business Direction & Strategy The first 45-minutes for was presentation given by Grant Aaron McBeath, Managing Director, Nokia Thailand and Emerging Asia, about Nokia business direction: focus on Windows Phone for smartphones, Java/Web Apps for feature phones and future disruption. He also showed the progress of Nokia Ovi Store with 10 million downloads a day and 177 publishers with more than 1 million downloads. The new Nokia Lumia 710 and 800 (WP7) and Nokia …

I’ve just attended the first day of Nokia Developer Day (6-7 December 2011). The focus was on software development for Nokia’s feature phones with Java or Web Apps (HTML/CSS/Javascript) and most of the time was spent on workshops to get started for developing for Nokia feature phones such as the S40 series. Introduction to Ecosystem Business Updates During the first 15 minutes, an “Introduction to Ecosystem Business Updates” was given by Jirapat Janjerdask, Head of the Ecosystem Developer Experience at Nokia Thailand. He gave an overview of the ecosystem for features phones including the brand, developer & publisher, mobile brand, mobile operator and consumer. One interesting statistics was that there are 10 millions app downloads every single day. He also talked about the new Nokia Asha 300 and 303 features phones available for 3000 to 4000 Thai Baht (100 to 130 USD) that are capable of running applications that usually run in smartphones such as Angry Bird and a Web …

The Advanced SIMD extension (aka NEON or “MPE” Media Processing Engine) is a combined 64- and 128-bit single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction set that provides standardized acceleration for media and signal processing applications similar to MMX, SSE and 3DNow! extensions found in x86 processors. Doulos has a video tutorial showing how you can exploit NEON instructions in assembler, how to modify your C code and provides the compile options for gcc to enable NEON during the build. Abstract: With the v7-A architecture, ARM has introduced a powerful SIMD implementation called NEON™. NEON is a coprocessor which comes with its own instruction set for vector operations. While NEON instructions could be hand coded in assembler language, ideally we want our compiler to generate them for us. Automatic analysis whether an iterative algorithm can be mapped to parallel vector operations is not trivial not the least because the C language is lacking constructs necessary to support this. This paper explains how …

The second Android developer Conference (AnDevCon II) took place about 10 days ago. Karim Yaghmour of OperSys published the presentation slides he used during his two Android presentations. The first presentation was Embedded Android Workshop, the same presentation he did at Android Open 2011. The second presentation “Android Variants, Hacks, Tricks and Resources” slides can be found below. Those 48 slides cover the following: AOSP’s limitations: Rigid, closed development model, excludes many things… Tearing AOSP apart Forks: Cyanogenmod: After-market handset firmware with custom launcher and lots of tweaks and mods… Replicant: 100% open souce with FDroid marketplace. MIUI: Closed source with UI enhancements. Ports: RIM Playbook: OMAP4 Tablet based on AOSP. Bluestacks: Android on Windows 7. Alien Dalvik: Android SDK + Meego SDK integration. Mods: XDA Developers. Melding with “Classic” Linux Stack: Rationale: Lots of available stacks in Linux, Android does not provide everything. Road blocks: File system, Bionic C Library, IPC, etc.. Where do I start? Android: AOSP, Linux: …

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and trainer at Free Electrons, shows how they used buildroot for a specific project at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. Abstract: Buildroot is a nice, simple and efficient tool to build small to medium sized embedded Linux systems, such as the ones found in many industrial systems or highly dedicated systems. Buildroot allows to automate the process of building a cross-compiling toolchain, building the root filesystem with all userspace components, building a Linux kernel image and a bootloader image. Based on experiences of a specific customer project, Thomas details how Buildroot can be configured and used to quickly produce nice, fast and efficient embedded Linux systems, but also how the target application development and debugging can be done based on Buildroot. You can also download the presentation slides.

Ruud Derwig and Mischa Jonker, both working at Synopsys, present different Android optimization methods at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. Abstract: Although compute platforms gain performance with every new generation, getting the most out of every cycle and milliwatt remains a key value driver for Consumer Electronics. This presentation opens up the Android platform and explain what platform components and frameworks can benefit from performance optimizations. The optimizations are illustrated using real-life examples from the porting and optimization of the Android platform for the DesignWare ARC CPU. Both Android platform and application developers will gain insight in how to improve Android performance. Topics that are addressed include the Pixelflinger, Linux kernel and drivers, Javascript engine, Bionic C library, and the Dalvik VM. We’ll demonstrate the portability of Android and suitability of the ARC architecture for building efficiently Android systems. You can also download the presentation slides.

Presentation entitled “Developing Embedded Linux Devices Using the Yocto Project and What’s new in 1.1” by David Stewart, Intel, at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. Abstract: The Yocto Project is a joint project to unify the world’s efforts around embedded Linux and to make Linux the best choice for embedded designs. The Yocto Project is an open source starting point for embedded Linux development which contains tools, templates, methods and actual working code to get started with an embedded device project. In addition, the Yocto Project includes Eclipse plug-ins to assist the developer. This talk gives a walk-through of the key parts of the Yocto Project for developing embedded Linux projects. In addition, features are described from the latest release of Yocto (1.1). At the end of the talk, developers should be able to start their own embedded project using the Yocto Project and use it for developing the next great embedded device. You can also download the presentation slides.